Re: [sv-ec] virtual methods

From: <jonathan.bromley_at_.....>
Date: Fri Jan 02 2009 - 06:32:11 PST
David Jones wrote:

> Would it help you or the committee to understand this better if I
> prepared a document explaining how this stuff works under the hood?

I'm pretty sure that Shalom is OK on his own with this...  and
although I agree that some of the "clarifications" in the existing
LRM are unfortunate, I suspect an LRM is not the right place to
put any further didactic content.  (Take a look at the "interfaces" 
clause if you need any evidence of this.)

We (Doulos) have been battling, for some time, with how to explain 
this stuff to people for whom it isn't second nature.  The 
"OOP Survival Skills" presentation I did for SV User Group in 
fall '08 has some content that seems to me to be a fair shot 
at explaining what's going on, but anything aimed at beginners 
is doomed to incompleteness and anything complete is doomed to 
incomprehensibility for beginners; so it's obviously important 
to have access to a range of different material, helpful to 
people at different points along the learning curve.

> Sometimes understanding the implementation helps to understand the
> concept.

Personally I rather agree - hence the comments in my presentation
about offsets from an address pointer, for example.  But it is
also important to lift yourself away from such low levels of
abstraction, at some point in developing your own understanding.

It would be interesting to see if SV-EC collectively thinks it
should have ownership of some tutorial/explanatory material,
or whether we feel that's best left to book authors, course
writers, vendor apps engineers and the rest of the zoo of 
EDA camp-followers/parasites amongst whom I count myself...
-- 
Jonathan Bromley
Consultant

DOULOS - Developing Design Know-how
VHDL * Verilog * SystemC * e * Perl * Tcl/Tk * Project Services

Doulos Ltd. Church Hatch, 22 Market Place, Ringwood, Hampshire, BH24 1AW, 
UK
Tel: +44 (0)1425 471223                   Email: 
jonathan.bromley@doulos.com
Fax: +44 (0)1425 471573                           Web: 
http://www.doulos.com

This message may contain personal views which
are not the views of Doulos Ltd., unless specifically stated.



-- 
This message has been scanned for viruses and
dangerous content by MailScanner, and is
believed to be clean.
Received on Sat Jan 3 08:39:21 2009

This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.8 : Sat Jan 03 2009 - 08:40:05 PST